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DM Guide
All DMs and Trial DMs running games for us need to know a few basic rules and guidelines. Remember we need to be considerate of the consequences of our DM choices on other DMs and players. We share this world and community. Rules # Anything that explicitly affects Luskan or the Guild needs to be run by Founders. For example: An NPC joining the town after a game, a building being constructed in town, a portal or dungeon being found in town. # When running games that take place in or around Luskan, please remember to consult maps and available resources to ensure that you are utilizing locations correctly. # Please use canon lore as your starting point, the Forgotten Realms wiki is a great resource. # This map details the larger Sword Coast region around Luskan, and our immediate surroundings. # Kobold Fight Club is a fabulous online tool, that allows you to enter your players levels, and match up monsters to them, allowing you to view difficulty. We highly recommend it; Check it out here. # Homebrew We don’t do it. See the section on reskinning. # House rules: We don’t want to stifle DM creativity, and DMs can house rule in their games so long as the changes they make aren’t disruptive to game balance or fairness. Please include them in your adverts. A short description works best, like: ‘House rules: Scroll Mishap Table’ # One suggestion that some DMs have found to be helpful is to plant the adventure hook in-character in an rp channel, giving active role players a sort of early warning that the game is opening if these are the kinds of players you’re looking for. # Travel in a session. We tend to hand-wave making players spend DTP to travel within a game, however they must still do so in instances such as paying to use a teleportation circle. Chartering a ship is fine, but if player are manning the ship themselves, a player character only counts towards the crew if they have proficiency in Water Vehicles or Navigator’s Tools. A ship requires a minimum number of skilled crew members as shown in the table in the DMG. Skilled hirelings need to be recruited to reach the minimum required crew. Trial DMs Here’s where you’ll develop your skills for pace, story, NPCs, creatures and rolling with the flow when your players turn the tables on you. # Trial DMs is a temp position. Once you have run at very minimum 3 games, and some players can vouch for the quality of your games, we will look at bumping you up. This is simply to demonstrate to us that you are competent enough, and have a good enough understanding of CR ratings and game balance. # Trial DMs must be approved by the Founders. If you are interested in becoming one, simply message one of us! # Trial DM's, must have played in at least one game on the server. # Trial DMs must have their sessions signed off with a Founder or Keeper to run them. This is simply for us to double check difficulty and CR balance. # Trial DMs can only run single session games. # Trial Dms can only run sessions below level 10. # Trial DMs must run games without world altering events. # Trial DMs can only reskin monsters with DM or Staff approval. # Trial DMs can supervise any downtime activity for PCs level 10 and below Full DMs DMs must be able to show they can run balanced games for appropriate levels, and must be knowledgeable of the 5e system, rules and play style of Luskan. DM status is approved by Founders. # DMs can run one shots, multi-session games or campaigns. # DMs can run any level range in a game. # DMs can re-skin monsters without approval. # DMs can run games that may start within Luskan. If a campaign you have planned may affect the town, run the plot points by staff. # DMs can add class levels to monsters. Running a game As a DM, you are free to run your games in any format you choose. Common formats include Theater of the Mind (TotM), conducted entirely in a voice chat and game lobby, Roll20 (www.roll20.net), an online virtual tabletop; or a combination of the two. Once you’re in the session, it’s efficient to ask players to change their Roll20 nicknames to their character name and their Passive Perception. E.g., Mollymauk PP10 | AC 13. In Roll20, ask them to add their names and HP to their tokens. Advertising your game Here’s the format to post your game in #game-announcements: Game Hook: Story synopsis. short and sweet. Session Name: Time: Date, time and time zone (include GMT, AEDT and EDT if possible) Lobby #: What voice lobby you will use. Try to look at other game adverts and avoid clashes. Level Range: Try to keep this within 3 levels, for instance, 4-6. If you increase the range, make it clear to lower level players that they play at their own risk. Number of Players: The maximum size of party you want to run with. Focus: Combat, RP, survival etc. This just gives players a hint of what they'll be facing. Difficulty: Easy, Hard, or Deadly Estimated Time: How long you expect the game to run. Hosted in: Roll20 / Discord chat etc House Rules: To Join: What info you want/need from players to sign up. Loot Common sense is king. Loot, gold and magic items should be level appropriate. We have a set of guidelines for this that uses a Rarity Point system to calculate the maximum amount of magic items for a single session based on average party level. These are guidelines and DMs may step beyond these bounds but they should be often for exceptional games, multisession games, or in other rare instances. In addition there are specific restrictions on certain magic items, please see the Magic Item spreadsheet for more information. It’s up to DM discretion if everyone gets loot, or if the loot is much more RP based and may not be exact numbers for everyone, for example, in a party of 5, perhaps 1 or 2 items and the rest is gold. This is fully up to DM’s. At the same time, not every game should include items, gold and experience are reward enough encouraged for low level or short games. Not every 5 hour session should include a hoard at the end, but most longer sessions on multi-session dungeon runs should probably include one. The rewards that are given should make sense to the session. A bunch of wolves won’t have a ton of gold, or magic items on them. Players can request a solo quest for magic item crafting supplies, per Xanathar’s crafting guidelines, see the Downtime Guide. After a session A session log must contain: Session Name APL (average party level) and play time List of players and their characters names. Short story synopsis of game what they accomplished Loot and gold received by each player. Downtime points/DTP and EXP per player. DMXP and DMGP. DM Rewards We incentivize and reward DMing here, after all, it’s a lot of work! DMing earns you DTP at the same rate as players (increasing at high levels), gold and exp for characters of your choosing, called DMXP. The character and DMXP must be stated in the session log. You may split DM XP between multiple PCs. DMXP allows a person who mostly DMs to remain competitive with their buddies. Tables for rewards are below. These numbers are derived from level advancement in the DMG. If your DMXP calculation leaves you with a fraction, round it up. E.g: 1322.25 xp becomes 1323. Once your character has reached the level range of 17, 18, 19, or 20, we no longer allow them to be awarded experience as we believe that such characters should be played in order to attain those levels. This is to encourage high level characters to have a voice and real character development throughout their growth. We supplement this reduction in growth at higher levels with more DTP. DM XP Table DM Treasure Tokens In addition to gold and XP rewards for DMing, DMs accrue tokens that allow them to acquire magic items for their characters. DMs accrue 1 token per game run (so long as the game is at least 4 hours in length). They may then spend these to roll on the corresponding magic items table and pick one of the rolled items to award to one of their characters. Common magic items can be picked instead of rolled for. The character awarded the item must meet the minimum level for that table. DM treasure tokens should be recorded alongside DTP. Downtime We operate using a system known as DTP or Downtime Points. DTP represents essentially ‘time credits’, with a single DTP being 1 day, and 5 DTP being 1 week. These are earned by playing or DMing in sessions, at a rate of 5 per hour, and 2 for partial hours. They are a way of quantifying and tracking anything that states it requires time, for instance, crafting, scribing a spell into your book for example. See our Downtime Guide. Category:DM Category:Guides